4 Comments

Thousands of factors go into making someone economically successful, but it only takes one piece of bad luck to make you an economic failure.

People who post bullshit memes like the one you referenced, have never actually been confronted with misfortune of the sort that can put you out on the street.

If the car breaks down they can pull out a credit card and get it fixed. Take away the credit and they too would face losing a job because you can’t get to work and losing your apartment because you can’t pay the rent. And so on in a cascade of misfortune.

Many lower income people are actually good at managing what little money they have because they have no choice. The deck is stacked against them and they know it. Many rich people can make terrible financial decisions, but get by because they have money.

Of course the idea that poor people are poor because they can’t manage money or they don’t have a “prosperity consciousness” is a staple of countless self help and New Age books and seminars.

They fuel the myth that people have complete control over their circumstances despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Expand full comment

The book Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard Reeves is a good companion to this post.

Expand full comment

I grew up in the bottom 1%, at least for a while and am in top 1% and I am not ashamed of my poor past. As many "self-made millionaires" are I am proud of my success. I do realize that most of it is really due to luck or at least factors beyond my control.

I was taught by my parents terrible money management. My mother used to run up the bills on everything, get to the point where she was going to get her heat, power, water and phone turned off, get an eviction notice and then skedattle out of town. This isn't really the best way to manage ones finances. If she got a windfall, she would give away half of it and then blow the rest. Granted "blowing the rest" would mean something like buying a modest color TV. We had no TV for quite a while growing up.

The main reason people are poor is because they don't make any money. Duh. But good money management skills helped drag me out of poverty and most of my siblings who eventually made it out learned them as well. The few who made some good money but just blew it all are back to being poor again.

Expand full comment

We are set up to keep poor people poor and it’s much harder to climb out of that bracket when you’ve been born into it. But I’ve watched my comrads go from min wage poverty to $75k-100k a year as escorts in a year and blow through it all the cash on designer handbags, clothes and first class travel because no one taught them how to handle money. My parents never spoke with me about investing and when I directly asked my dad about his finances he got upset— money and sex are the 2 topics considered to be inappropriate to discuss openly, which is why I believe sex work is a trigger for people and why much of the trade is criminalized. We need education about money and economics just like sex ed in school. We don’t get enough of either.

Expand full comment